8 MB blocks = 1.15GB per day, or 420GB per year. Sure it might be feasible to run a node if you're in a first world country with fast internet and cheap storage (cost of living wise), but even in rural america, 34.5GB is a significant chunk of bandwidth. Not to mention they eventually plan to raise it to 32MB, which works out to 4.6GB a day or 1.63TB/year.
This whole pipe dream of little Jimmy running his full Bitcoin node on a raspberry pi in order to protect against the big bad bankers/government/whatever was never based in reality. Bitcoin was always destined to end up centralized. Either in the form of powerful companies controlling it (development, Lightning Network, etc) or large concentrated groups of miners.
Whichever path it ends up going down, centralization is guaranteed.
Well, there's a large middle ground between "little Jimmy's raspi's 4GB sdcard' and 'VISA's multi-PB datacenter'.
While there is certainly centralization pressure on mining, I do not agree that 8MB blocks make it impossible for everyone except for 'powerful companies' to run a full node, especially a pruned one. An enthusiastic early adoptor or investor holding, say, $100k of the token is more than capable of spending $500/yr to run a colo'd node. Would they prefer to spend $0 and host it at home? Probably. But the expense of a high-end VPS or low-end colo box is not totally prohibitive. We're not talking about more than a few rack units worth of HW.
As if people in the third world have money for transaction fees, opening and closing lightning channels, and of course locking up funds to use the channel.
The idea that bitcoin can exist only as a settlement layer is a dream. It was pitched as something you can buy a cup of coffee with. Now the core team wants to call that a "spam transaction". Yeah right. Time to fire Core.
So for those people they can use a light client or run a node online. What is their benefit to running a full node?
Not to mention, if Bitcoin becomes a settlement layer then no one can run a full node since most transactions will be off chain. Plus the enjoyment of running a full node is greatly reduced if you're just seeing settlement data between large payment systems.
>So for those people they can use a light client or run a node online. What is their benefit to running a full node?
being able to fully verify the blockchain and the transactions. sure, if all you care about is making a payment you can use a SPV client or even a webwallet, but being able to not r
>if Bitcoin becomes a settlement layer then no one can run a full node since most transactions will be off chain
that's what the lightning network is for. in which case you don't even need the huge blocks.
1 gb ~ 2 hours 15 minutes of 1 mbps. 1 tb ~ 3 "mbps months". You need ~ 100mbit to do 1 tb in 24h. (These number are probably underestimating protocol overhead a bit).
